


Charming Assymetry

by Rubynye



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece, F/M, Gen, dragon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25704373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: Sit by my knee and let me tell you the story of our City. Not of its founding but its freedom.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character, Princess who Went Missing/Dragon She Ran Away With/Knight Who Thought She Was Kidnapped
Comments: 12
Kudos: 25
Collections: Original Works Opportunity 2020





	Charming Assymetry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



> Written for HostisHumaniGeneris in the Original Works Opportunity 2020. I hope you enjoy this!

Oh no, my blossom, you can’t go out like this! Not with two matching earrings! Have we not told you — no we have not. And of course my son wouldn’t know the tale in full. Sit by my knee and let me tell you the story of our City. Not of its founding but its freedom.

In days so far past we had not yet mastered iron but dealt only in bronze, in the city three _poleis_ to the west, there lived a princess. Her parents had been blessed twice over; not only had their queen borne nine children, but each and every one had grown into a fat and happy baby who lived through every childhood fever and survived to become a beautiful young person. They had two sons, their heir and a loyal spare, and seven daughters, maidens all as beautiful as tall flowers. The youngest was our princess, her name Melissam, Bee-balm. Being the youngest of such a populous house, she went half-unminded by the nurses and maids, and from her weaning she ran up hill and down dale as she would, ranging far afield. 

In her fresh girlhood she entered a deep cool cave one roasting summer’s day, and found a dragon sleeping within, clad in scales of gleaming azure, copper, and gold. The dragon opened one slitted bronze-green eye, and little Melissam smiled, and the dragon lolled out its long forked tongue and flicked it across her head in acceptance. Ever after, they were great friends.

Meanwhile, she had already made another friend, a son of the palace with a dozen candidates for his father, his mother one of the serving-ladies who assisted the Queen by day and lay with guests by night. Evriskon they called him, Finder, because from his toddling days he could find any lost bauble, any lost goat, any lost child. He and Melissam had been fast friends, and he was the only one she trusted with the secret of her dragon friend. If occasionally a sheep went missing that even he couldn’t find, he knew whence it had truly gone.

So Melissam grew wild and fresh as an herb, roaming the scented hills above her parents’ city, until the day her father the King received a threat incised upon a clay tablet, and looked up from it to see his youngest daughter, glowing with sunlight and beautiful as any blossom.

The threat he had received was in a letter from the tyrant Kentris, who led our city in those days. His grandfather had raised us from a village to a city, and he had been newly crowned his father’s heir and just as swiftly crowned king when his father fell from the battlements. His cruelties were already renowned, and he had razed two cities which have since been re-founded, and reduced their farmers to helots, and now he threatened Melissam’s city. He had already slain three wives in his rages, and yet Melissam’s royal father looked at the letter, and called his scribe to him, and bade him write back, ‘Spare our city and we shall send you a bride.’

And then he and his royal wife called Melissam before them, to tell her of her fate.

They told her, and her golden face paled with fear, for she too had heard the legend of the tyrant Kentris and how he stood on his people’s necks. She opened her mouth to beg for her life and saw her father and mother set their faces like stone towards her. So all she asked was, “Most royal parents, may I have a sevenday to walk the hills I love and bewail my virginity?”

The King set his mouth tighter, but the Queen inclined her head and said, “You may have a night and a day. Then you will return to your chamber to pack and prepare, for on the fourth day from now our caravan sets out.”

Melissam shut her mouth, and swallowed hard on what she would say, until she could make the sign of obeisance and say, “most royal parents, I thank you both,” and flee the throne room.

Of course she went not to her chamber, nor to the temple, but straight to her friendly hillsides, and to the cool cavern of her friend the dragon. Who listened, and blew steam from its nostrils, and said at length, “I was thinking I would let this cave air out a few years. Let’s fly to another.” And it lifted Melissam on its snout to the ridge of its neck before the join of its wings, and strode to the cave mouth, and flew straight up so high all who saw it thought it a distant eagle.

Whence did Melissam go, you ask? Would you have me tell the tale all upside down? We shall find her in good time.

And so her royal parents found her bedchamber empty upon the fall of evening, and they sent for Evriskon, to command him to find their fled daughter. He stood up straight, and looked them in their royal faces, and said, “Your Majesties, my Mistress and my Master, I cannot do this. I know not where she has gone.” Which was but the truth.

“You defy my command?” thundered the King, but Evriskon stood steady, and answered, “No, Great Sir, but I cannot find her.”

The Queen laid her hand upon her husband’s arm, and extended the other to Evriskon, and said, “Young Knight, I beg of you, please find my daughter and be sure she’s safe.”

Evriskon did not speak of whom they intended to give Melissam over to, or how unsafe a husband a tyrant would be, but he inclined his head, and said, “Yes, my Queen, I will do as you bid.”

And then he set out, and traveled a dozen days and a dozen nights across rough country, and prayed every night to Artemis and every morn to Athene for wisdom. And on the thirteenth day, high at noon, he saw a ridge of mountains rising, and a small cave in the side of one, and how it glowed as with a flame within.

All the rest of the day he traveled to the cave, watching its luminous mouth grow in his vision, and at sunset he reached the mountain’s knees and began climbing through rocks and spars up to the beckoning glow.

At midnight, sore and weary beyond his youth, Evriskon hauled himself over the lip of the cave, and drew his sword, and trod as silently as he might. Because he heard, far off and deep within, a maiden’s voice.

In and in, towards the glow, as the air began to warm from nighttime coolness through to heat, until he turned a corner and he saw —

The great golden shimmering dragon, curled upon a wide stone floor, holding a torch aloft in the coiled tip of its tail, and in the center of its bulk, Melissam lying comfortably, bare as at her birth but for her golden bee earrings, reading from a scroll between her hands. 

And then she saw Evriskon, torchlight glinting off his eyes and armor and blazing from his polished bronze sword, and she gasped. And the dragon saw him and mantled, and he lifted his sword to meet its challenge.

But Melissam sprang up, lithe and naked, and flung out her hands, and shouted, “Stop!” And they did.

And Evriskon swayed.

“Oh!” Melissam cried, and dashed forward, gleaming in the torchlight, and Evriskon’s head grew light as his other grew heavy, it did! Ha, your blush, as if you’ve not been wed two months now! She caught him by his shoulders, and said, “You found me!”

The dragon growled, but Melissam turned to it and said, “He’s my friend from my childhood, remember him? He means you no harm.”

Under her touch all his last strength drained away, and his tongue lay still in his mouth, and he suffered her to lead him back to the dragon’s side. “I know why you’re here,” she said, as she pulled his armor from his shoulders and his sword from his hand, sheathed it and dropped his sword-belt to the stone floor, stripping him till he stood in tunic and belt and boots. “And I shall not go back. We will talk on it in the morning.”

The dragon raised its voice then, like metal clashing. “Your friend reeks of old sweat,” it complained, and Melissam laughed, and pushed Evriskon against the dragon’s side. Its scales were smooth and warm and its muscles rippled thick and firm beneath them.

“He’ll bathe in the morning,” she said, as Evriskon helplessly slid down the dragon’s side to the warm, warm floor. “Sleep now,” she told him as she picked up the scroll again, and his ears could not make sense of the words she read from the scroll, and his eyes fell shut on the light along the curves of her body.

In the morning they bathed indeed in the cool cave-pool, and washed his travel clothes, and laid them out on broad rocks to dry. The dragon brought forth a fire-roasted suckling lamb, and Melissam a basket of fruit, and they sat birth-bare and ate and talked. 

“But you must come back,” Evriskon said, unwillingly.

“I shall not go back,” Melissam insisted, stoutly.

At length the dragon’s bronzen voice crashed upon Evriskon’s ears. “Boy?”

“Yes, Golden Sir?” Evriskon answered, wiping juice from his chin.

“You tell us you told the Queen you would see her daughter safe. But you said no word to her of returning.” The dragon snorted a lick of flame, as Evriskon understood, and tipped his head back and laughed, as Melissam clapped her hands and cried out for joy.

But then they beheld each other, and a new thought came to them both. Evriskon nodded, but Melissam thrashed her unbound hair around her distressed face. “No,” she said, “I cannot, do not tell me it’s a woman’s lot to bear pain, I _cannot_ bear Kentris’s hand!”

“What if you had not to?” Evriskon said, looking to the dragon. “What if your friend here might aid us? And is so doing help us free a city as well as a princess?”

The dragon hummed loud and long, little licks of flame all around its muzzle, as Melissam looked up at Evriskon, her eyes wide, and at last began to smile. “And why should I?” The dragon asked at length. “Why meddle in human affairs when I can sit in my cave while my maiden friend reads to me?”

But now Melissam reached to her right ear, yes, this ear, as soft as yours, and pulled the golden bee from it. “Because every woman and girl of Kentris’ city shall give you the gold upon their right ears, and every man and boy the gold upon their left shoulders.” And Evriskon added his left arm-ring and his assent. 

They laid the gold before the dragon, who looked upon it, and breathed upon it till it smoked and ran liquid as blazing sunlight, and flicked it up with its tongue and tossed the shining ball through the air towards its hoard, to solidify as it flew into a gleaming drop clanking into the pile. “Then let us go retrieve my hoard,” the dragon said, but Melissam laughed and patted its gleaming-scaled neck.

“Let us rest, we are but little humans,” she said, casting her eyes upon Evriskos, and before they had been wide, child’s eyes, but now she looked up through the veils of her lashes, and he felt his bare skin warm with more than dragon flame. “Let us travel in the cool evening and make the city at dawn.”

The dragon laid its massive head down again, and Evriskos laid himself down beside its flank, beside Melissam. And if a young man and a young woman lying bare side by side got up to any mischief together, well, it has not come down in the tale.

So they rested, and dressed, and the dragon lent Melissam necklaces and rings and hair ornaments that she might dazzle the tyrant’s eyes. And they climbed up and sat behind the dragon’s head as it took to the evening sky, air streaming past them like fresh water as they soared.

At dawn, the Sun rising behind her, Melissam walked with Evriskos behind her to our city’s Eastern Gate, and lifted her voice and cried out, “People of Kentris’ City, tell your lord his bride has arrived!” 

The Gate creaked and grated open, for in those days it was bronze not iron, and the guards stood amazed at this woman, hung with gold, hair loose upon the breeze, peplos pinned upon just one side so her bare golden shoulder shone like her adornments. The people climbed the wall to see her, and all but swooned at the sight. 

At some little length Kentris came clanking in armor down the Main Street, with his seven body-men striding behind him in arrowhead formation. “Welcome, Wife!” he called to her, stopping within the Gate, but Melissam held her ground, and Evriskos at her back. “Is this all your baggage, one rough attendant?”

“My goods and gear will be brought by my servants,” she said smoothly. “Now come forth, my lord, to welcome me into your city!”

And so he did, and his seven men behind him. And as soon as the last strode over the city’s boundary, between the unlocked gates —

Yes, indeed, my perceptive girl. Up came the dragon from the Western side, spanning the city in a single bound, and with a single snap of its jaws it engulfed Kentris, armor and all, ground him between its teeth and swallowed him up. His seven men looked up and screamed like babes, and the whole city gasped, and for a moment all hung in silence.

And then stones and bricks began to fly from the city walls at the seven, flung by the people, driving the former tyrant’s men back from the city’s safety. The dragon roasted them all in their armor and crunched them up one by one until there was nothing left but drifting smoke, then settled, massive and golden, behind Melissam and Evriskos. 

And she raised her arms again, and cried, “O City, I bring you deliverance, but at a price. My ally the dragon has been promised a reward. One earring from every feminine right ear, one ring from every manly left shoulder. Will you provide? Will you accept our aid?”

There was another moment, as the wind blew away the smoke, as Melissam’s unbound hair streamed out beside her. And then the city’s people, my ancestors and now yours, my daughter, cried out “yes!” as with one voice, and the golden baubles rained down. And Melissam stripped off every decoration the dragon had lent her to crown the pile, thus showing our people she would not ask of them what she would not do herself. 

The dragon roared its delight, and gathered up every scrap of gold with dragon-magic, and bounded into the sky. And Melissam and Evriskos walked up into the City to a shower of flowers and ribbons and blessings.

That is when we gained the name Polidrakos, and how our current dynasty was founded. Officially Queen Melissam’s three sons were sired by Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes, but it has come down in the tales that all three had the same height and farseeing eyes as her general Evriskos. And this is why we never wear matched earrings or fibulae or arm-rings, in honor of the day of the dragon. So we live in our charming assymetry.

So let me tuck my earring into your tender young ear, and there you are, wearing one of Queen Melissam’s bees. And now you may go forth to dazzle the City, as she once did.


End file.
